A lot of folks are thinking that you had to be stupid to live in New Orleans, but my daughter Maria lived there for a while in summer 2001, and I'm sure glad she moved back to Manhattan in time for the WTO disaster! As one of the world's most beautiful cities, founded by the French colonials and filled with beautiful architecture, stately neighborhoods, and cultural history, it might have received some respect, and its people some protection.

Protection from nature? From disastrous tropical storms? From flooding we knew could happen? Yes, like the Dutch provided for Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and the entire Dutch nation — half of which lies below sea level.

Welcome To the Netherlands wrote:

The Netherlands is best known for its tulips, windmills and clogs. And for its low altitude and vulnerability to flooding.

The Netherlands lies on the delta of three major rivers: the Rhine, Maas and Scheldt. It owes its existence to feats of hydraulic engineering.

The Dutch are proud of their conquest of water. Their struggle to keep dry has helped them develop a can-do attitude. And since controlling water requires many parties to meet and plan together, it has forced them to learn how to work as a team. That is why their European partners and the broader international community regard the Dutch as bridge builders and often ask them to serve as such.

Floods

The Netherlands’ many bridges, dykes, windmills and pumping stations give it a unique appearance and illustrate its long struggle against the sea. The crowning achievement was the Delta Project, a chain of dams protecting Zeeland and South Holland from the North Sea.

Work on the Delta Project began after the 1953 floods, and it ended in 1997 with the completion of a storm surge barrier in the Nieuwe Waterweg. The barrier has two enormous hinged gates that can be lowered in severe weather to close off the 360-metre-wide waterway. It protects greater Rotterdam’s one million inhabitants from flooding without harming the environment.

A quarter of the Netherlands’ land area lies below sea level. The low-lying areas consist mainly of “polders”, flat stretches of land, surrounded by dikes, where the water table is controlled artificially. From the 16th century, windmills were used not just to keep the land dry, but even to drain entire inland lakes.

As a practical matter, I think it's good that the Forest Service is letting people camp for free, but it also strikes me it would make it a helluva lot easier to camp out if they'd drop off some tents, trailers, kitchens, toilets and water in the campgrounds! At any rate, let's find these places, because some people are gonna need 'em.

The US Forest Service wrote:

Release No. 0348.05 Contact: Daniel Jiron (202) 205-1134 FOREST SERVICE WAIVES CAMPGROUND FEES FOR HURRICANE KATRINA SURVIVORS Washington, Sept.3, 2005 - The USDA Forest Service is taking another step to assist survivors of Hurricane Katrina by temporarily rescinding the fee requirement for campgrounds and the 14-day stay limit for camping on some National Forest System lands in the Southern Region. The normal fee range is $4.00 to $25.00 depending on the location.

The forests offering free camping include the Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana, the National Forests of Alabama, the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest in Arkansas, the Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas and Oklahoma and the National Forests and Grasslands of Texas. In all, 106 campgrounds are open without charge to victims of Hurricane Katrina as they transition through these first weeks of the disaster.

Location information on the fee-free campgrounds will be shared through the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and state and local assistance agencies. Individuals and families with communications capabilities can call their nearest USDA Forest Service office.

The USDA Forest Service efforts are a component of the active response efforts by USDA to provide immediate relief to displaced residents by providing food, water and housing. For a comprehensive overview of USDA efforts go to: http://www.usda.gov. More information on hurricane recovery activities through FEMA is available at http://www.fema.gov. Last Modified: 09/03/2005

THE "DROWNING OF NEW ORLEANS" WAS PREDICTED IN 2001, by Charles Carreon

1:21am, September 6, 2005

Michael Chertoff is really a fine team player, the kind of guy who will get the Medal of Honor someday, just like George Tenet, who sold the CIA's credibility down the crapper, and Paul Bremer, who declared victory and abandoned Iraq to wallow in bloodshed. Michael Chertoff will achieve this high honor because of his demonstrated ability to blandly redefine truth as whatever is convenient to say. He has now blandly stated that no one could've foreseen this whole disaster, but the University of Louisiana did, and shared its conclusions in a huge article in Scientific American called “Drowning New Orleans,” in the October 2001 issue. The article estimated a possible 100,000 dead, based on a worst case scenario computer simulation that looks just like an aerial view of the post-Katrina waterscape that has replaced the New Orleans city grid. The water depths achieved, ranging up to 20 feet in depth, were also predicted by the University's simulation. So what's not to foresee, Mike?

CNN wrote:

Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist. However, experts for years had warned of threat to New Orleans

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur. But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees that would flood the city of New Orleans.

VIDEOS OF MAYOR NAGIN, NEW ORLEANS SURVIVORS, AND MORE, by Charles Carreon

9:56 pm, September 7, 2005

The video reports coming out of New Orleans are shocking in their consistency. This isn't accidental neglect, but the imposition of a cruel lie on the entire country. The people of New Orleans are being treated as if they were to blame for this disaster, as if they have something to apologize for. There cannot be enough outrage in response to this callousness, which is perfectly exemplified by Barbara Bush's observation that the survivors huddled in the Houston arena are getting some kind of a vacation from struggling for a living because they're getting to spend the night in a stadium. Is this lady insane? People lived in New Orleans like they do anywhere else, in houses, on dry land. But why should I rant when the people themselves are on video to speak? Please watch the video of Mayor Nagin, who handles himself very well, and would clearly govern the nation better than the clique of chickenhawks and self-serving “tycoons” who fiddled while New Orleans drowned.

This video of Charmaine Neville of The Neville Brothers musical family is absolutely horrifying. If you can't play it, please read the transcript at the bottom of this post. Additionally, the American-Buddha.com website has put together a page of publicly available newscasts and videos documenting the Katrina disaster in a very accessible format. Although you do have to sign up to join this website, it just takes a second, and is really worth it for all of the incredible material on there. Clicking on any of the links below will take you directly to a special Katrina Little Movie page as soon as you sign up (for free). Just sign up once, then you can stay logged in. Use Winamp to play the movies on your computer.

”I was in my house when everything first started. I live by the high water in the 9th Ward in New Orleans. When the hurricane came, it blew all of the left side of my house, the north side off, and the water was coming in my house in torrents. I had my neighbor, an elderly man who's my neighbor and myself in the house, with our dogs and cats, and we were trying to stay out of the water, but the water was coming in too fast, so we ended up having to leave the house. We left the house and we went up on the roof of a school. I took a crowbar and I burst the door open on the roof of the school to help people, to get them up on the roof of the school. Later on we found a flat boat and we went around in the neighborhood in the flat boat getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the school. We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people.

But then, things started getting really bad. By the second day, the people that were there, that we were feeding and everything, we had no more food, no water. We had nothing, and other people were coming into our neighborhood. We were watching the helicopters go across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and tell us, “Hi,” and that would be all. They wouldn't drop us any food, any water, nothing. Alligators were eating people, they had all kinds of stuff in the water, they had babies floating in the water, we had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people, people that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals, and from the old folks' homes, I tried to get the police to help us but I realized, we rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from the 5th district police station. The guy who was driving the boat, he rescued a lot of them and brought them to different places where they could be saved. We understood that the police couldn't help us, but we couldn't understand why the National Guard and them couldn't help us, because we kept seeing them but they never would stop and help us.

Finally, it got to be too much. I just took all of the people I could, I had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs, and I rolled them from down there in the 9th ward to the French Quarter, and I went back and I got more people. There were groups of us, you know, there were about 24 of us. And we kept going back and forth and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the French Quarter, because we heard that there were phones in the French Quarter, and that there wasn't any water, and they were right, there were phones, but we couldn't get to them. I found some police officers, I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there, by guys who had come [CENSORED BY WAFB9] neighborhood where we were that were helping us to save people, but other men, and they came and they started raping women, and [CENSORED BY WAFB9] and they started killing, and I don't know who these people were. I'm not going to tell you I know who they were because I don't. But what I want people to understand is that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened. People are trying to say that we stayed because we wanted to be rioting, and we wanted to do this, and we didn't have resources to get out. WE HAD NO WAY TO LEAVE! When they gave the evacuation order, if we could have left, we would have left. There are still thousands and thousands and thousands of people trapped in the homes in the downtown area.

When we finally did get — in the 9th Ward, and not just in my neighborhood, but in other neighborhoods in the 9th Ward, there are a lot of people who are still trapped down there. Old people, young people, babies, pregnant women. I mean, nobody's helping them. And I want people to realize that we did not stay in that city so we could steal and loot and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost their minds because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't stop. And we'd do SOS on the flashlights, we tried everything. And it came to a point, it really did come to a point, where these young men were so frustrated that they did start shooting. They weren't trying to hit the helicopters, they figured maybe they weren't seeing, maybe if they hear this gunfire, they would stop then. But that didn't help us. Nothing like that helped us.

Finally, I got to Canal Street, with all of my people that I had saved from back there — there was a whole group of us — and I — I don't want them arresting nobody else — I broke the window in a RTA bus. I never learned how to drive a bus in my life. I got in that bus, I loaded all of those people in wheelchairs and everything into that bus, and we drove and we drove [breaks down in sobbing] and we drove. And millions of people was trying to get me to help them to get on the bus. [breaks down crying] What I did was with all of the willpower I had. I just tried."

Lately the NewSpeak agency has turned up the volume real loud. You remember NewSpeak, don't you — Orwell discovered it back in 1984. Remember Winston Smith? Remember O'Brien? Remember when you had a brain? Before you became a spineless Party Member?

"'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,' he said. 'I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in The Times the other day. You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?'

Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. 'Hardly scholarly,' he said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject. I have never had anything to do with the actual construction of the language.'

Before we all learn to write NewSpeak, it's time to fight back. Somebody tries to give you a raft of bullshit, like the Bush Administration isn't racist, tell them to Have A Nice Day, then crank this vintage Ramones in their ear to drive home the point.

HAVE A NICE DAY

I heard it from the gangster I heard it from the priest I heard it from my best friend Way down in the middle east

Have a nice day. That's all I hear every day Have a nice day. I don't believe a word you say

I heard it from the landlord When he kicked me out I heard it from the spirits As they possessed my house

Have a nice day. That's all I hear every day Have a nice day. I don't believe a word you say

When they look me in the eye, I turn the other way It's just a trained reaction something they gotta say... yeah

I heard it from New Zealand I heard it at the club I heard it from my doctor Before he pulled the plug

Have a nice day. That's all I hear every day Have a nice day. I don't believe a word you say Have a nice day. That's all I hear every day Have a nice day. I don't believe a word you say

It may only take a village to raise a child, but it takes an entire planet to build a Big Mac. That’s the message of Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction thriller, “Fast Food Nation.” Nonfiction, as in every line of it is true. Thriller, as in, money, power, drugs, oceans of spilled blood and shit, and a runaway train loaded with biological weapons set to destroy the entire planet. It’s a cliffhanger, a role-playing story for all humanity. It turns out that, a couple of million years after we left the trees and conquered the savannahs with our omnivorous appetites and tool-making ways, it’s time to return to eating like gorillas.

Just the Facts, Ma’am

Schlosser is a big magazine writer, but don’t let that turn you off. He writes like a good cop thinks. His style is tuned liked a Kawasaki 1000 police motorcycle and he investigates like he’s got a grudge against corporate evil. He chases down the bad actors other reporters call boss for the same reason every muckraker rakes muck – he hates what he sees because what he sees is ugly as hell. But he’s a diligent professional. He doesn’t babble jargon like a zealot. He builds his case. He bags and tags his evidence meticulously, unobtrusively footnoting his extensive sources. Then he presents it all in a very detailed and convincing exposition that reveals a complex criminal conspiracy operating an ongoing criminal enterprise. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll be ready to issue indictments.

We’re a long way even from defunding the fast food industry, much less indicting it for its crimes. Our parents didn’t eat the way we do. We don’t know why we’re eating corporate burgers, munching oil-soaked fries, and downing vats of iced sugar soda. We don’t know why we eat in plastic environments built like school cafeterias, attached to plastic playgrounds. We don’t know why we don’t find fresh foods attractive, why antacids are the most popular over-the-counter medicine.

Knowledge is power, and knowledge is often difficult to acquire, which may be why so few people have any power. This book makes acquiring vital knowledge easy, with crisp chapter titles and a story that starts at the beginning, studying the deeds of four old white guys — Walt Disney, Ray Kroc of McDonalds, Carl Karcher of Carl’s Junior, and Colonel Sanders of KFC. These four men each streamlined their products, automated production, marketed uniformity, and anonymized their employees to proselytize their visions of life and commerce. Although Kroc approached Disney solicitously with a plan to operate McDonalds restaurants in Disneyland, and was painfully rebuffed, Ronald McDonald is now far better known than Mickey Mouse. Indeed, the surrealistic purveyor of Happy Meals is giving Santa Claus, the number one imaginary being, a run for the money.

The Mechanization of Food Production

Kroc didn’t invent Ronald McDonald out of whole cloth. The original McDonald brothers operated a massive drive-in burger joint in San Bernardino, complete with young waitresses bringing trays of food to those enormous rolling fortresses they called cars. The cars were filled either with families or young men looking to hit on the carhops. The business was very successful, but the brothers tired of hiring platoons of carhops and replacing broken glasses and stolen silverware. So they closed the place for retooling, installing bigger grills and a burger production line, so skilled cooks were no longer needed. They threw away all the glasses and silverware, and henceforth served only foods that could be wrapped in wax paper or sucked through a straw. They ditched the carhops and made everybody line up at the window, but the burgers were cheap and business took off like a rocket. Kroc, then a traveling salesman in his early fifties, admired the McDonalds operation because they bought enough mixers to make forty milkshakes at one time.

The formula that Kroc bought from the McDonalds and franchised to the masses was a hit, and others followed the trend toward assembly-line food preparation. Carl Karcher copied McDonalds because they were just twenty miles away from his successful barbeque restaurant down in Anaheim, and Karcher knew the future when he saw it. Harland Sanders reinvented himself as a Southern gentleman, adopting the string tie and white suit as a marketing gimmick, and achieved his goal of putting at least two drumsticks in every bucket by adopting the new method of mass-produced cooking pioneered by the McDonalds brothers. Southern California loved the new way of eating, that fit perfectly into the seventy-mile an hour lifestyle, and soon the era of monumental sign architecture began to mark the landscape. Kroc built Golden Arches so big they dwarfed the stores, but they could be seen from a distance in time to let freeway drivers maneuver to the next exit. Eventually, the profile of the fast food industry has come to loom equally large over our entire civilization. Schlosser summarizes the numbers: “In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2001, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined.”

The mechanization of food production turned people called cooks and waitresses into something much less dignified – burgerflippers. Burgerflippers are underpaid, and generally work a job less than six months. Small wonder. The job is statistically incredibly dangerous, like late night cashiering in a gas station or liquor store. Bet you didn’t know that the largest cause of employment death today is homicide. That’s because security at your average McDonalds sucks, because the money handling system is as uniform as the food, and sometimes angry employees come back to take their share of the loot they used to count, and sometimes decide to even the score with an assistant manager or two. Schlosser interviews one McDonalds employee who matter of factly packed a pistol to work and expressed no concern about a possible holdup, since he intended to act proactively in any armed encounter.

The Cruelest Business

The philosophy and method of manufacturing fast food turned into a machine with such tremendous money-moving power that today, when McDonalds says “jump,” the meat industry says “how high?” For years the USDA has been unable to obtain clean ground beef for the school lunch program, and it still can’t. But when McDonalds saw European store sales falling off the chart, and Jack In The Box demanded clean meat for its restaurants, the meat packers fell into line. Fast food ground beef at Jack and Mac’s are much cleaner than the cow crap laden meat that the nation feeds to its schoolchildren. And it make them sick, by the thousands. Food poisoning is far more common and deadly than you would think, afflicting 200,000 Americans every day, sending 900 to the hospital, and 14 to the morgue. For those whose eyes glaze over when they see latin names like Salmonella, Listeria, Staphylococcus, Clostridium or E Coli, Schlosser boils it down into “a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.”

The meat is full of crap and the meatcutters are tweaking on methamphetamine, aka “crank.” Crank is the drug of choice for immigrant slaughterhouse workers that have to “make a knife cut every two or three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts during an eight hour shift.” The pace of production is insane, surpassing any prior known levels of cattle butchering: “The old meatpacking plants in Chicago slaughtered about 50 cattle an hour. Twenty years ago, new plants in the High Plains slaughtered about 175 cattle an hour. Today some plants slaughter up to 400 cattle an hour – about half a dozen animals every minute, sent down a single production line, carved by workers desperate not to fall behind.” No matter how much meth you do, though, there is no way to gut and extract the gastrointestinal system of a cow that fast and not make a regular mess of it, spraying shit all over the beef that is destined for America’s dinner table.

What’s A Prion?

In an afterword entitled “The Meaning of Mad Cow,” Schlosser updated his first edition of Fast Food Nation. In the afterword, Schlosser establishes that the destructive power of the meat machine has not been fully unleashed, because the truth about mad cow disease – its causes, vectors of transmission, and incubation period, are still unknown. Similarly unknown is how many people in the USA have in fact eaten meat infected with “prions,” the nearly-indestructible protein-based agents for the transmission of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (“BSE”). The answers to these unknowns will determine the number of victims and the scope of the cattle-destruction effort that the USA will have to undertake. The answers are lacking of course, for the same reason we don’t know how many Iraqi civilians have been killed in our liberation operation – bureaucrats aren’t good with big numbers.

Since the date of Schlosser’s afterword, published in 2002, we have been treated to a continuing coverup by the USDA about the extent to which BSE has afflicted the American cattle population. In case you thought your meat was cleaner because you live in the Pacific Northwest, where everything is better, it’s time to take a reality check. On August 20, 2005, the Associated Press reported that “slaughterhouses in Oregon and Washington have been cited at least eight times for breaking federal rules to protect against mad cow disease, putting the Northwest above average for violations.” The federal rules to protect against mad cow disease don’t require testing to be sure that BSE-prions aren’t in the meat, they just forbid the meatpackers from feeding people any “tonsils or small intestines,” or if the cows are over thirty months old, “the ban extended to the brain, skull, eyes and parts of the spinal column,” because these parts are “the most prone to mad cow infections.”

Are you surprised that the USDA tells you there’s no risk of BSE turning your brain into a mass of spongiform encephalopathy, but it still doesn’t test to see if cows have it? Well don’t be! It would be way too much trouble to test every one of those cows for mad cow disease. What’s a priority with our current President, as he made clear in one of his “State of the Union” addresses, was testing athletes for drugs, because an athlete on drugs would be far more dangerous than a hamburger full of BSE. Hmmm, now that I think about it, “athlete on drugs” describes California governor Schwarzennegger pretty well, and may be a good description of Bush himself. It just goes to show, politicians often know what they’re talking about.

More Than The Meat Is Rotten

Speaking of politicians, it’s not just the food supply that’s contaminated, my friends. The consolidation of food production forced by the fast food industry’s demand for uniform goods has turned potato production, beef production, chicken farming, and flavoring production into highly concentrated industries, each dominated by a handful of corporations that fix prices, suppress wages, and jointly wage a pitched battle against government regulation. But for the European ban on “Frankenfoods,” genetically engineered potatoes would be in every bag of French fries, and Taco Bell would still be feeding people corn that was meant for animal feed only. We know more about the industry’s insane drive to act as a law unto itself due to the heroic efforts of a couple of London Greenpeace activists who defended themselves, with almost complete success, against a libel suit McDonalds filed in England, by proving the truth of their harshest accusations. After eight years of litigation and a trial, Justice Rodger Bell concluded, in an 800 page judgment, that McDonalds advertising exploited children, McDonalds food endangered diners, McDonalds wages were unreasonably low, and McDonalds was to blame for animal cruelty violations by its suppliers. Through the litigation, the Greenpeace activists learned that their London group had been infiltrated by at least seven private detectives hired by McDonalds, so many that sometimes half the people at Greenpeace meetings were working for the Big Clown. At trial, Sidney Nicholson, a former South African policeman who supervised the Greenpeace spying, testified that McDonalds enlisted Scotland Yard’s Special Branch to track Greenpeace as a subversise organization, who then passed the information on to McDonalds.

Time To Take ‘Em Down

Like cancer, the fast food industry has taken over the productive capacity of the planet, and is busy reproducing its own cells at the expense of the entire organism. Like the tobacco companies, the fast food industry has been attacked for its policies, but has more successfully controlled the media and obtained government protection. Of course, when you can get a fat pig like Limbaugh to ridicule lawsuits filed by obese people, you’ve got a pretty good weapon. The fast food industry and its minions, agribusiness and the cattle and chicken tycoons, contribute disproportionately to publican candidates, seeking and obtaining the deregulation that makes the assembly lines move faster, keeps the crap in the meat, the grease in the fries, and all of their workers underpaid, uninsured, and at risk of violent death. Fortunately, Schlosser notes, we can vote with our feet. Here in Ashland, the voting has already started. A&W shut down a decade ago, McDonalds closed last year, and last week, we bid adieu to Dairy Queen. Perhaps 2005 will mark the high-water point for the industry that currently sits astride the world’s population like a huge, gross parasite. Do your part. Eat beans.

This just in from the Dept of Homeland Security website — the Customs arm of the Dept of Homeland Security is delivering $17 Million worth of clothing seized because it was "in violation of trademark laws." That is to say, these clothing are fakes, knockoffs of famous brands like Adidas, Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, and other popular consumer names.

From the DHS website: "Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement - U.S. Customs and Border Protection(CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) trucks delivered several thousand items of clothing to Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Jackson, Miss., Houston and San Antonio, Texas. The clothing, seized in violations of U.S. trademark laws is worth estimated at over $17 million."

One of the problems of clothing like this is it's not just got fake brands, it's shitty apparel. It falls apart quickly. As Bruce Sterling described this phenomenon in a recent Wired article:

"They say you can't understand people until you've walked a mile in their shoes. I just walked across Belgrade in a brand-new pair of Nikes. Now I understand something: The citizens of this city are the vanguard of a new phase of capitalism. They're busily subverting conventional multi-national commerce and creating a dark parallel process - call it black globalization.

My new shoes look authentic, but they're a scam of ominous sophistication. The insole logo is silk-screened on; my socks erased the Nike swoosh in a single afternoon. The stitching is coarse and sloppy - the pull tab at the heel ripped loose the first time I tried to use it. The sporty soles are slippy, not grippy. The tag proclaims MADE IN KOREA, although the product is almost certainly a fake churned out by a Chinese factory. Adding insult to Nike's injury, the phony barcode denotes a pair of Reeboks."

So, while FEMA is actively turning away donations of decent clothing being offered by people all across America, DHS is rushing them all the fake, crappy apparel they have on hand. It must strike the guys in Customs as very funny: "And ye shall know them by their phony baseball caps and pirated pants." Other good jokes, "Hey whaddaya mean you're not from New Orleans. You tell me you bought that Louis Vuitton on Rodeo Drive?"

I should also point out that all of these counterfeit goods are, in ordinary times, a total liability. When I worked for Louis Vuitton at an LA lawfirm, we paid big, big storage bills on "millions of dollars worth" of Vuitton luggage we'd seized. That was a drag on the system. We couldn't give it away, or give it to charity, because that would defeat the purpose of seizing it — to keep poor people from sporting wealthy people brands. We couldn't burn it because it was an environmental hazard. So we stored it. The people at DHS are very clever, because this is going to free up a lot of storage space.

Back on September 4th, The Washington Post ("WAPO"), mysteriously unable to get hold of public documents of great national importance, falsely accused Democratic Louisiana Gov. Blanco of having not declared a state of emergency. Now, WAPO has a correction on their website, and has deleted the original NewSpeak item. WAPO now admits that Gov. Blanco made the declaration on August 26, but has offered no apologies.

But it's never too late to be wrong twice, when you are all part of one big media cesspool of disinformation. So on September 12th, Fox News presented a "timeline" that eliminated Gov. Blanco's declaration of emergency from the record, while carefully including the declarations of Florida and Mississippi's governors.

Given the gravity of these mis-statements, which accuse Gov. Blanco of criminal negligence in the conduct of official duties, causing the deaths of hundreds of Louisiana citizens, I would recommend that she immediately file suit against WAPO and Fox for displaying reckless disregard as to the truth of the matters asserted by their spincasters. And be sure and sue in Baton Rouge.

The publicans are getting out in front of an issue that could have legs — Katrina was caused by global warming. Out in the forefront of the opposition, bucking the storm winds, is Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe:

Washington post wrote:

Bill Holbrook, spokesman for Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), said ".. the notion that Katrina's intensity is somehow attributable to global warming has been widely dismissed by scientific experts."

Maybe so, but in a recent Science article, Georgia Tech researchers and the National Center for Atmospheric Research reported that the number of major Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has nearly doubled over the past 35 years. And, the researchers expressed the opinion that this strengthens the connection between global warming, rising sea temperatures, and the increasingly damaging hurricanes.

POWER RESTORED FIRST TO PIPELINE WHILE HOSPITALS REMAIN DARK, by Charles Carreon

6:36pm, September 16, 2005

Cheney pulled Mississippi power workers away from their work restoring electricity to hospitals that had been dark for several days, delaying the return of power to those facilities for 24 hours.

The workers weren't told until after they'd worked sixteen straight hours that they were making the world safe for Big Oil and risking their lives to help out Cheney's cronies at Colonial Pipeline Company. Everything about the work was dangerous, their foreman said, likening the job to chainsawing wood in the dark with a flashlight. Given that the job was decorated with broken power lines, flaming tree branches, and floodwaters, it's a tribute to their skill they succeeded.

I can understand Cheney's alarm, and why he felt it was a national emergency. He is very identified with the flow of oil. Having had a quadruple bypass, he knows that continuous, uninterrupted fluid flow is the way to health and survival. He personally identifies with the oil infrastructure almost as if the pipelines were his own veins, and the flow of oil his blood. See illustration below.

Power crews diverted -- Restoring pipeline came first

By Nikki Davis Maute

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina roared through South Mississippi knocking out electricity and communication systems, the White House ordered power restored to a pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast. That order - to restart two power substations in Collins that serve Colonial Pipeline Co. - delayed efforts by at least 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt.

At the time, gasoline was in short supply across the country because of Katrina. Prices increased dramatically and lines formed at pumps across the South.

"I considered it a presidential directive to get those pipelines operating," said Jim Compton, general manager of the South Mississippi Electric Power Association - which distributes power that rural electric cooperatives sell to consumers and businesses.

"I reluctantly agreed to pull half our transmission line crews off other projects and made getting the transmission lines to the Collins substations a priority," Compton said. "Our people were told to work until it was done.

"They did it in 16 hours, and I consider the effort unprecedented."

Katrina slammed into South Mississippi and Southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29, causing widespread devastation and plunging most of the area - including regional medical centers and rural hospitals - into darkness.

The storm also knocked out two power substations in Collins, just north of Hattiesburg. The substations were crucial to Atlanta-based Colonial Pipeline, which moves gasoline and diesel fuel from Texas, through Louisiana and Mississippi and up to the Northeast.

"We were led to believe a national emergency was created when the pipelines were shut down," Compton said.

White House Call

Dan Jordan, manager of Southern Pines Electric Power Association, said Vice President Dick Cheney's office called and left voice mails twice shortly after the storm struck, saying the Collins substations needed power restored immediately.

Jordan dated the first call the night of Aug. 30 and the second call the morning of Aug. 31. Southern Pines supplies electricity to the substation that powers the Colonial pipeline.

Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Mike Callahan said the U.S. Department of Energy called him on Aug. 31. Callahan said department officials said opening the fuel line was a national priority.

Cheney's office referred calls about the pipeline to the Department of Homeland Security. Calls there were referred to Kirk Whitworth, who would not take a telephone message and required questions in the form of an e-mail.

Susan Castiglione, senior manager of corporate and public affairs with Colonial Pipeline, did not return phone calls.

Compton said workers who were trying to restore substations that power two rural hospitals - Stone County Hospital in Wiggins and George County Hospital in Lucedale - worked instead on the Colonial Pipeline project.

The move caused power to be restored at least 24 hours later than planned.

Mindy Osborn, emergency room coordinator at Stone County Hospital, said the power was not restored until six days after the storm on Sept. 4. She didn't have the number of patients who were hospitalized during the week after the storm.

"Oh, yes, 24 hours earlier would have been a help," Osborn said.

Compton said workers who were trying to restore power to some rural water systems also were taken off their jobs and placed on the Colonial Pipeline project. Compton did not name specific water systems affected.

Callahan's Visit

Callahan is one of three elected public service commissioners who oversee most public utilities in the state. Commissioners, however, have no authority over rural electric power cooperatives.

Nevertheless, Callahan said he drove to Compton's office on U.S. 49 North in Hattiesburg to tell him about the call from the Department of Energy. Callahan said he would support whatever decision Compton made.

Callahan said energy officials told him gasoline and diesel fuel needed to flow through the pipeline to avert a national crisis from the inability to meet fuel needs in the Northeast.

Callahan said the process of getting the pipelines flowing would be difficult and that there was a chance the voltage required to do so would knock out the system - including power to Wesley Medical Center in Hattiesburg.

With Forrest General Hospital operating on generators, Wesley was the only hospital operating with full electric power in the Pine Belt in the days following Katrina.

"Our concern was that if Wesley went down, it would be a national crisis for Mississippi," Callahan said. "We knew it would take three to four days to get Forrest General Hospital's power restored and we did not want to lose Wesley."

Compton, though, followed the White House's directive.

Nathan Brown, manager of power supply for the electric association, was responsible for overseeing the delicate operation of starting the 5,000-horsepower pumps at the pipeline.

Engineers with Southern Co., the parent company of Mississippi Power Co., did a dual analysis of what it would take to restore power and Brown worked with Southern Co. engineers on the best and quickest way to restore power.

Work began at 10 a.m. Sept. 1 and power was restored at 2 a.m. Sept. 2 - a 16-hour job.

Night Work

A good bit of the work took place at night.

Line foreman Matt Ready was in charge of one of the teams that worked to power the substations and the pipeline. Ready's shift started at 6 a.m. Sept. 1; he received word about the job four hours later and saw it to completion.

"We were told to stay with it until we got power restored," Ready said. "We had real safety issues because there were fires in the trees on the lines and broken power poles."

Ready described working on the lines in the dark like attempting to clear fallen trees out of a yard with a flashlight and a chain saw.

"Everything was dangerous," he said.

Ready said the crew members did not learn they were restoring power to pipelines until after the job was done.

How did they feel about that?

"Is this on the record?" Ready asked. "Well, then, we are all glad we were able to help out."

Compton said he was happy to support the national effort. But he said it was a difficult decision to make because of the potential impact in the region had the plan not worked and the area's power restoration was set back days.

"It was my decision to balance what was most important to people in South Mississippi with this all-of-a-sudden national crisis of not enough gas or diesel fuel," Compton said.

"In the future, the federal government needs to give us guidelines if this is such a national emergency so that I can work that in my plans."